Things began to disappear on the first day of summer. The people of the city didn't believe that much harm could come to them at first, because at first the things which disappeared were of little consequence, and did not affect their daily lives. It was grease that went first. All the restaurants began to notice something peculiar about the meat they cooked: it no longer sizzled when put on a skillet. They now had to butter up the pan to get it to cook at all, otherwise it began to smoke and burn and make a mess. This was true for beef, pork, mutton, poultry, any kind of meat the people of the city tried to cook. This didn't translate into a great calamity. Most were grateful for it, and ignored the mystery of how it came to be. Now that the whites had magically disappeared from their steaks, they could eat as much meat as they pleased, without the attended weight gain in fats. Men who would otherwise avoid meaty fare ate nothing but beef for a few days before becoming either bored of the taste of it or disgusted with themselves for giving in to this sensation. The restaurants prospered for a few days on the perfect leanness of the meat; then business evened out.

This first disappearance was reported as a curiosity. Local radio stations mentioned it near the end of the program. The evening news made it its human interest piece. It only found a place in the lighter op/eds of the newspapers, near the bottom of the page. The city took it in good humor. Nothing had been displaced but something they'd wanted to get rid of, anyways. Animal fats wouldn't be missed.

The second thing that disappeared was all the glass. Windows became bare squares in buildings. Lightbulbs were empty holes in ceilings. The scientists in the western quarter drove into their research laboratory to find a small halo of papers blowing around it like an atmosphere; the wind had gotten to them. They didn't get to go inside, because the smell of all the poisons they'd been toying with had escaped from their glass containers; luckily, the more volatile stuff had been encased in plastic, deep under the foundation of the laboratory. The process of cleaning up all the toxins rushed past, as the scientists had to be let back into their laboratory, to figure out what had happened to all the glass.

The television station worked out of a four-story building in the center of the city. There used to be a scenic view of the city's beating heart as a backdrop to the evening news, but the disappearance of the glass had changed this to a very large picture of that same view stapled onto some plywood, which took the place of the old window while the Plexiglas replacement was being ordered. It was a very fuzzy picture, which could only be confused with the view it replaced if it was seen from far away. This forced the television station to zoom far away from the anchor, to get the whole picture in focus behind him, in order to maintain the appearance of normalcy, casualness and calm. You couldn't make out the anchor's eyes.

The television station had its way of dealing with the disappearance of the glass; others of the city found less expensive means. The poor in the suburbs hung curtains where their windows had been. A black market started in candles, which became very expensive in a very short amount of time. Insomniacs no longer had any recourse to their waking nightmares in lightbulbs. Those with night terrors were confined to darkness, unless they found a match in their insanity, and a thing to strike it on. It was only the beginning of summer when the glass disappeared, so nobody froze to death on account of the missing windows, but the smog from the traffic in the afternoon could no longer be ignored. The taller buildings swayed dangerously in high-altitude winds, and many of them had to be evacuated. The problem of there not being any mirrors was solved almost immediately with the import of big, flat panes of polished steel. Clothing stores scrambled to get at least one of them; the rich got a few and positioned them in strategic places around their living rooms, to catch and throw around the light of their candles and torches. The only miracle was for the city's sanitation: porcelain toilets hadn't gone with the glass.

The most God-fearing people of the city were the first to take these disappearances seriously. Some pastors made angry, hellfiring sermons, with their voices backed up by the howling of the wind through the holes where the stained glass of the churches had been. There were only a few of those kinds of pastors, and they were ignored into calming down over time. Most took it only as a matter of fact: their windows were all empty; it was some kind of sign, this much was obvious; premature judgments and condemnations were not what people wanted, nor what they needed. Mass as usual went on, perhaps with a gently pointed prayer for guidance and wisdom during this trial, whatever the trial was. Things were still uncertain. Nobody knew anything.

The panic and concern only existed there, veiled in the most popular masses of Sunday morning and afternoon, and in the secret hearts of everybody who looked through the gaping apertures in every wall in every building, house, apartment, car, television set and watch face. It was a rationalizing kind of fear. They could do without animal fats in their diet; they could survive without glass. Obviously, the next victim of a mass disappearance would be something they could do without. In response to this logic, some people jettisoned what they could afford to lose; they sold their cars and bought bicycles; they bought leather clothes and aimed to live the rest of their lives inside them; they abandoned the fashionable meat and fatless poultry and ate nothing but vegetables and nuts. These were only extreme cases.

The newspapers didn't report anything of real worry until everybody's fingernails disappeared. The people of the city woke up one morning to find their fingers completely naked at the tips. Where the nails had been, there was a little round blob of skin, like a layer of putty had been stuck on the back. It wasn't putty, though many tried to scratch it off while lacking nothing to properly scratch with.

The realization of the missing fingernails spread like a plague of thought. The first people to notice this absence woke up and tried and failed to shake the dust of sleep from their eyelids. This made them yelp; this yelp brought the attention of neighbors, who reached out to pull back the curtain to see what the noise was about, only to find the hand that fixed the curtain was bare of nails. With its entire constituency and most of its masthead woken up before sunrise by savage yelps, the newspaper was forced to confront the phenomenon. A new edition of the morning paper was rushed into print, typed by terrified, newly-altered fingers. Those who hadn't heard of the disappearance by the mass yelping read about it in the paper. In the time it took the readers' eyes to move from the newspaper to the hands that held it, the change had taken them, too.

The practical problems of not having any fingernails were overshadowed by the panic of everybody being maimed and nobody knowing why. Few people said plague, but the rare joke of the disappearances had to do with frogs, boils, locusts and whatnot. Fingernail jokes were rare because they were never made by the same people twice. The weather hadn't changed at all. It had been pretty sunny most of the time, nothing unordinary. Occasional rain, no drought, no outward reason for panic other than the vanishing of a few things.

After that day, the newspaper was flooded with op/ed pieces, searching for a reason behind the disappearances. Some labeled them as "disappearances," while the more dramatic called them "vanishings." "Vanishings" sounded more stirring, sensational enough to describe the uncertainty of what would go next. The news stations didn't show the anchors' hands. Only one picture of a hand without fingernails appeared in the newspaper. It belonged to the editor. All other appearances of this phenomenon were either blurred out or far enough in the background to maintain calm.

Regardless of its position in the photographs of the newspaper, the fingernail disappearance turned the curiosity and vague fear that had existed before into a state of shock. People couldn't ignore the fact that they had no fingernails. Nobody could explain it any better than they could the lack of any fat on beef or pork, or the empty space in every windowsill. The religious looked to their texts, to see if God had ever cursed a city in such a way, and found no precedent. He had always thrown things at places he hated; earthquakes; pillars of fire; locusts, frogs, boils, the Angel of Death and whatnot.

Desperate for some kind of answer, the local news turned to science. They had a man on at the head of their hour. To demonstrate what was happening, he tore out a page from a book and took out a pair of scissors and said this:

SCIENTIST (careful monotone; taking deep, unexcited breaths) : What's written on here, the words, that's us. (holds up paper) What's happening is this: (takes up scissors; cuts off a piece of the margin) So far, none of what's disappeared has affected us (points to the worded part of the paper), but to say that it won't one day do that, it's too early at this point to tell.

Which it was. Most people accepted this as a matter of fact. It was as plain as the fleshy lumps at the end of each of their fingers. The ones they saw on the scientist's hand, when he'd held up the scissors, they weren't able to ignore. Things were going away, and nobody knew why.

People coped in different ways. It was strangest for new couples. The more vain of the two would fret about their strange new fingers; the other would either tease them or ignore this pining. Some people got false nails and glued them to their skin. They didn't stick on for long, and it was so useless to pretend at this point that a week into the ordeal nobody even tried to.

After that had nearly passed, or after the shock cleared into a numb feeling, like poking a callus, there were no more chairs. Every last one, wooden, plastic, metal, folding or no, everything with four legs, a seat and a back ceased to exist. In contrast with the panic caused by the disappearance of the fingernails, this was almost comical. Throughout the day, the local radio station had the comics of the city make jokes about chairs. Nobody had known how abundant these jokes were before. They got old quickly, but people laughed now, though what they were laughing at was no longer there.

That evening, the local news station did a story about the vanishing chairs. Not only had they gone, but it was now impossible for new chairs to be made. The reporter began with an exposition about the disappearances, how nobody knew why they were happening or what would go next. The exposition lead to a puzzling discovery into the nature of the phenomenon. The reporter then went into an interview with a local carpenter. The footage showed him making a chair. The interview was played over this footage; in it, the carpenter explained that he'd been working with wood for most of his life, and though furniture wasn't his specialty, he knew how to make a chair. This interview wrapped up at the same time the camera cut to the finished chair. The carpenter put a ten-pound weight on the seat of the chair. Its legs collapsed like a stumbling newborn horse. This exchange then occurred:

REPORTER: Wow. How long have you been making furniture?
CARPENTER: On and off, all the while I've been in business.
REPORTER: It's like something wanted the chair to fall down.
CARPENTER: Well, I'm not a religious man.

Every missing chair was replaced by a stool, given from the mayor. He personally financed the works: they were made from lumber out of a mill near the city; they were painted brown and black, both colors bought from local paint stores; the padding came from a packing plant by the shipyards and the postal service. Four of these stools were afforded to each family. They were put together by prisoners, contractors, probates and workmen. Hundreds of thousands of them were given out. It became a symbol, a thing to organize around: God or karma or fate or folly had taken their chairs, so they made stools.

In a speech, the mayor explained why he'd provided this service. It had stimulated the city economy. It had given the people something to do as one people: to go down to City Hall, or a local school, or a hospital, and pick up four wooden stools. And, instead of staring at the empty space at their tables, where chairs had once been, they had stools. They were ugly, but they were something.

This was how he closed the speech:

MAYOR (little fat man; notebook in his hand; glasses; white hair on top; speaking to a microphone) : I'm not sure why these things are happening. I don't think anybody has the answer yet. I am sure of one thing, and I see that clear over everything else that's come of this situation. I see this city coming together. I see us working for a solution to a problem that affects each of us. And whatever it is, whatever happens, whatever goes away: we'll get through it, and we'll get through it together. Thank you.

The pastors and journalists and scientists warned against pride; they begged their readers and followers not to tempt the fates by mocking the triviality of the vanishing of the chairs. Something big would come next, they said; it would come out of the letters, not the margin. They were heeded, but not acknowledged. People naturally knew not to jinx it. The comics disappeared from the radio station as soon as the replacement stools went out.

The missing things became a part of everyday life. People became used to looking at their hands and seeing nothing at the ends of them but more skin. Some of them carried around little steel razor blades, in case they had to scratch at something. The old delighted in how fresh and young the new skin over their fingers looked. People wore contact lenses instead of eyeglasses. Traffic accidents decreased; without windshields, high speeds became unbearable to maintain. A curfew started for cars and buses; since there were no headlights, they were deemed unsafe after sunset. The people of the city compensated for this with public transportation: the subway had been completely ignored by the vanishings, its windows were all plastic. Every city bus was coated with glow-in-the-dark paint. At night, they became big green glowing whales, the only vehicles allowed on the road.

By then, the most severe blow to the city was the first wave of emigrants. Many hundreds got spooked enough to leave town. Many of these people had been promising themselves to get out of the city, some day, but lacked a reason to before, and had one now. The train station ran endless cars full of people wanting to flee before something irreplaceable was taken away. Some of the city folk got angry about the fleeing masses, called them cowards, deserters. Others didn't care. Still others cared and asked the departed to call or write. In spite of their asking, no calls or letters came; people thought this was because those that had left didn't want to risk any kind of contact with the vanishing city, in case the curse found them again. Regardless of how they felt about the emigrants, the last anybody heard of them was a good-bye out of an empty train window.

They'd heard as much from the rest of the outside world. Everybody expected a national news crew at any given day to bust into the city limits and start taking pictures of empty streetlights, glowing buses and the mayor's stools. None came. The editors of the newspapers, the city council, the television stations wrote query letters to the outside about this odd, interesting phenomenon, though odd and interesting barely described what was going on. They were met with no reply. It was either much less spectacular of a thing than they'd made it out to be, or the theory about outside participation in the vanishing was correct. This theory came from the same scientist who invented the words-and-margin model: the first thing that had vanished was the interest of the outside world in the vanishing. The theory had been proven early on, when people tried to compensate for the disappearance of the glass by ordering massive quantities of the stuff. The shipments arrived empty every time an order was placed. It wasn't known if they were mailed empty, or emptied in some cosmic interruption on the road into the city. This couldn't be known for sure, as any attempt to question the glass-makers about the emptiness of the shipments was met with silence on the other end. The rest of the world couldn't intervene, but could only conduct business as usual. That was the only way they could operate.

The disappearances had begun after the school year was over, which gave the city time enough to put in orders for Plexiglas window replacements for all the schools. They were given second priority, after hospitals. It would've taken a national catastrophe or world war to disrupt the coming of the school year, and the vanishings were neither of those.

There was a lull in the vanishings after the chairs. Many good things happened in response to the disappearances; people became more bold. The notion of "seizing the day" became much more resonant than ever. When they went to bed, the people of the city were not sure what would still be there when the morning came. It had happened that way with the fingernails: one day they'd been there, the next they weren't. Impulsive people became more impulsive. Since none of them knew if tomorrow would vanish, they acted like it would. The taciturn tried to store up for the next vanishing, reserving the perfect amounts of everything in their lives, love, food, water, shelter, to make up for what might be gone in the morning. People frustrated with their jobs either waited and prayed for them to disappear, or ranted and frothed at the mouth at their bosses while they still had the chance to clear their consciences. Professions of love and marriage proposals happened often. The red light district was in constant demand. Confessionals were only slightly busier than usual.

Keyboards were the next to go. All typewriters and laptops disappeared. The only desktop computers which had been functional after the glass went were the ones with flat-screen monitors, and these were now rendered mostly useless without the keyboards attached. The newspapers were hit the hardest by this. Deprived of their one means of production, it took them a few days to figure out a solution to this newest vanishing. Instead of writing out their articles the old way, journalists would now compose one draft long-hand and then cut and paste words from the Internet to make something resembling a newspaper. It took a very long time to produce a much shorter paper, but the news got told. Some students at the university created a program for the library, for public use: it resembled the journalists' idea, but you just had to click once on a given word. Its database of words included the entire dictionary, which made picking out the right one a long and tedious process; putting two together the right way was even more difficult. The students' efforts were compensated by the mayor, who invented and gave an award to them.

The volume of op/ed pieces in the newspaper shortened to maybe one every other day. Most of them were written by pissed-off people who sat in the library for hours completing bits of broken English until getting frustrated enough to quit. The papers ran these out of pity. Anchormen on the news stations had to read off written cue cards instead of the teleprompter. It was much easier that way.

There was an upside of it. The edge of peoples' writing hands became a common cause. They would lift them up and say something like, "Vanishing's a bitch," or "Makes you feel close to the words, doesn't it?" Trite remarks like these were most often met with smiles. A few people got suspicious of their neighbors, accused them of harboring keyboards and eyeglasses and rocking chairs and Big Mac's, but these people were crazy anyways.

Radio programs which aired in the dead of the night got a surge of listeners. This was because, without television or lightbulbs, listening to music was the only thing people living alone in the city could do in the dark. If they were lucky, they fell asleep to it; if they were luckier still, it happened without them thinking of what would be there in the morning.

The Fourth of July was observed by more people that year than any other. There was a very large parade, with Uncle Sam sitting proudly on a brown stool at the head of the procession. It was quiet after that, as it usually was after a holiday, because many had left on vacation. After a few more quiet days came the grim realisation that those that had left would not return. When they called the vacationers, they never talked about why they hadn't come back. They didn't respond to questions about their fingernails. The outsiders were not only mute to the vanishing; they were probably deaf and blind to it. They could talk with them about anything in the world, except for the one thing which which nobody wanted to say was at the center of theirs.

The near-dead halt of written Internet communications from the city sent out a small, quick shake throughout the economy. After the disappearance of the keyboards, the stock market relied on telephone calls and emails for the bulk of its communications. The former continued as usual; the latter were hard to replace. Fax machines were dug up out of the industrial heap of closets. The switch was much more gentle than it had been for the newspapers. Foreign businesses might have thought it odd that all the businesses of the city had all of a sudden changed to faxing instead of emailing, but the people of the city had no way to know this for sure. Every time an apology was made for the archaic process of faxing, no reply came back.

Relations with outside friends became cold, muted. There was so much that happened that they wanted to describe but couldn't. The vanishing became like a secret nobody could help but keep. Those that hadn't left already, and hadn't started leaving yet, were resolved to see what became of the phenomenon. They did this either out of devotion to their homes and their remaining friends, or because they didn't like the thought of leaving in the middle of a thing they likened to a silent fight for existence; others stayed because they knew there was no place for them. If they left, they would find no other home, and they knew it. They would think of what would've happened if they'd stayed in the city for a few days longer. They'd look at its place on the map and wonder if, by now, anything was left. And everybody who stayed, whether through pride or fear or loyalty, knew that if they left, they would never see anybody else from the city for the rest of their lives. Those that vanished were gone for good. That was another theory that experience turned into a fact, like juice into sour wine.

After the keyboards went the small animals and coat hangers. The coat hangers were nothing. Like the chairs, they were easy to brush off. When closets opened to heaps of fallen clothes, still pinched at the shoulders and waists where the hangers had once been, no panic ensued. The mayor called a press conference that evening and called the latest evaporation the silliest yet, a thing his better sensibilities warned against. He called it that because the vanishing showed a weak point. The absurd skin was showing under the armor of fear, so he took a stab. He held up the thing that was supposed to replace the coat hangers. It was a little row of hooks to hang clothes off of. It was made out of plastic, and the mayor said that five hundred thousand of these rows would be available by tomorrow afternoon. The mayor wasn't sure how so many of these things could be made in so short a time, but he figured that the owner of the plastics plant would escape responsibility. Since it had to do with the vanishing, none of the owner's bosses would ask about it.

The small animals were much more disconcerting. Now that the windows had disappeared, and now that traffic had ceased at nightfall, many people living close to the ground woke up in the morning to the sound of chirping birds. Then there was no chirping. There were no squirrels chasing each other around trees, jumping off branches, coaxing food from human hands. There were no chipmunks darting between holes in stone walls. Sparrows no longer startled and fled from the food between parked cars when a horn sounded in the street. Mice didn't crawl in the walls and rats didn't maraud in cupboards. The city was turned quiet except for the human white noise and the barking of dogs and traffic and the titanic rush of subways. The only small sounds left were the wind stirring a newspaper up, which some vermin would've otherwise turned into a home; the decay of food discarded by people which they would otherwise consume; the death rattles of the fleas and mites and mosquitoes that fed off them alone.

They left a hole in the city's food chain. Stray cats were found dead, deprived of their main sources of food. Those that survived lived off bugs and garbage. People felt sorry for them and put out plates of cat food. Within an hour, these plates became swarms of insects. They multiplied so quickly that the DPW ordered massive quantities of insecticide to combat the problem. Street sweepers were assigned to spread the poison. They divided the city up in quarters and sprayed the stuff until there was none of it left, then ordered some more. The bugs were bearable for a while, until the DPW paused in their spraying. In the gap between the depletion of the first shipment and the arrival of the second, the bugs had spawned enough to make up for the ones that died. Hopelessly, the mayor ordered the plastic company to fashion thousands of yards of netting to replace the windows.

The environmental scientists at the university said that the bugs wouldn't last. Any sudden spike in the insect population was bound to even itself out eventually. This many insects couldn't exist in one place for very long, they were bound to trip over a food shortage, and probably soon. The population could either find some way to balance itself on the available stores, or it could carry on reproducing at the same rate as now and doom itself. These scientists said that the insects were stupid, and would probably create a famine for themselves and solve the problem within a few weeks. This was shallow comfort to people who had to staple thick black plastic netting in the space where their windows had been.

People realized that living things weren't safe from the vanishing. There was only a vague hint of this possibility when their fingernails went away. Now the small animals were gone. If the scavengers, the species that barely survived off the crusts of humanity, had disappeared, the logical next step was to domesticated animals. Cats and dogs had been spared, and those who owned them started paying more attention to them. Would they be spared again? And if, the next time something went away, if their pets were next, what came after that? Children?

The mayor faced most of these questions in press conferences, except for the ones about the future of the city's children. Those questions were too close to terror to put into words just yet. The mayor gave the answers he had. Solidarity was their best defense. Whatever the future held, no matter what their place was in this emptying world, the only thing they had to rely on was and would continue to be each other. It was enough for now.

The police became more visible than ever before. The mayor didn't want to raise his peoples' hackles by doing this. In normal situations, he'd still want the law to show as much face as possible without appearing intrusive. Now that presence was in higher demand. Crime hadn't flared up yet, but he was expecting people to get mighty pissed about the situation any day now. The early, easy heat of June to mid-July had passed. Now the rest of July came slugging along, dragging August behind it like a feverish corpse. With heat came crime, it was an old rule.

The mayor started to prepare for the next vanishing. He figured whatever mind controlled what would be taken away could probably read a mayor's, so he didn't obsess about it; he also knew how endlessly futile it was to prepare for something which, by its nature, was impossible to prepare for. There wasn't any pattern in the disappearances. He thought of the margin-and-word demonstration that scientist had provided. The bottom margin was probably cut off by now, and with the vermin probably too were gone the last line or two of words. It was horrifying to imagine. It was like putting on a pair of paper slippers and walking into a pool of acid, feeling the soles burn off your feet and antimatter pain consume your skin.

When the city woke up to find their air conditioners gone, most of them wanted to believe that they'd been stolen. Many got up and angrily walked over to their neighbors' homes and knocked on their doors to wake them up and ask some angry questions. This got them hated for both their tone and the thing they'd revealed. By the afternoon, the heat that the air conditioning had once made bearable in the city core had turned into a hot slaughter. A small, exhausted, sweaty mob gathered outside City Hall, demanding an immediate solution. The mayor came out, just as pit-stained as everybody else, and said that he'd compiled a think tank of engineers and scientists from the university to figure out ways to counter these disappearances. He said that they were working out a fix for the vanishing of the air conditioners right now. In the meanwhile, he advised them all to stay out of the sun and drink lots of water.

This think tank didn't go very far with new inventions. One suggestion was to manufacture air conditioners in the city and closely monitor them, to make certain they didn't disappear. This was countered by two facts: air conditioners weren't like leprechauns, they didn't evaporate if you looked away from them; the city didn't have the funds to turn itself into an air conditioner factory overnight; and they had all seen the newscast of a veteran carpenter's chair collapsing, they probably wouldn't work, no matter how carefully they made them. The cheapest solution they found was a glass of cold water put under a fan.

A few people said that the Romans had lived just fine without air conditioning or glass or keyboards. These were all modern inventions, dispensable, forgettable debris humanity had collected around itself and could discard at will. They abandoned this line as the heat got steadily worse in the core of the tall buildings. Without air conditioning, they turned into enormous Dutch ovens. The wind came through the netting on the higher floors, but the bottom floors were suffocated by the other buildings, competing for a cool draft. Dogs laid down in the shadows of buildings.

The think tank found one solution to the problem of the heat. The theory was to have a deep trench dug in the basement, then filled with ice. At the bottom of the trench would be a pipe. A pump would carry ice-cold water into each floor. Pipes would bring cold water to each room, and there would be removable panels on them for especially hot days. These panels would open to expose the cold water, running through a kind of fountain. The only thing that needed to be found was the right kind of piping to use, and a way to make sure the water didn't leak from the fountain. The cost of so much ice would probably exceed what the city treasury could afford, and the mayor refused to employ any solution that didn't work for every last one of his people. But the idea was tested, and worked, except a filtering system was added to the pump, and an antibacterial solution applied to the water, and a grate on the fountain to keep childrens' hands and mouths away. In the meanwhile, the mayor signed an order for a quarter million electric fans, foreign imports, the cheapest that could be bought.

After signing the order in his office, he handed it to his secretary, for copies to be made. When she left, he put his head between his hands and began to sob. His secretary waited outside the door for three minutes with the copies in hand before knocking twice.

"Mayor?"

"Come in, please," he said. She walked in with the copies under one arm.

"Is something wrong?"

He laughed. "I doubt you meant that as a joke, I'm sorry."

"Oh. I could come back later, sir, if you'd prefer."

The mayor looked at her with dry, reptilian eyes. "Thank you." She left a copy on his desk. He leaned back in his chair for a while, trying to cry again. He screwed up his face and ran his nose and pinched his eyes shut, trying to shake one tear loose from his eyelids. Nothing happened.

Of all the things that had vanished, only the tears weren't mentioned. Of all the secrets the vanishings produced, that was the biggest one. They could shake and moan and collapse in pain and agony and the torture of an existence spent on the blade of a knife of what is and what might no longer be, but for all their wailing and all the teeth they gnashed, not one tear escaped their eyes after that. The secret wasn't that they couldn't. That was obvious. It was obvious in the way they talked about the vanishing, about how hot it was without air conditioners, about their conversations with friends from out of town, about how they missed seeing the sparking squirrels chasing each other, waking up to the sound of birds, the calm midnight rolling of a mother mouse feeding her kin in the walls. That wasn't the secret. The secret was a thing they saw in each others' eyes. It was an anguish that had escaped them before in the smashed starlight of their tears and now had nowhere to go but deeper and deeper inside them. They wanted to cry for the things that had been taken from them and the people in their lives who'd abandoned them out of fear, and they couldn't. That was the secret.

Churches got busy after that. Church was one of very few things that felt good anymore. The missing stained glass was troubling, but most places had scenes from the Bible painted and carved on the ceiling and walls, and that was enough. The pastors handwrote their sermons now, and they were more direct now than anybody remembered. They sounded better, too. There were readings from the book of Job. They talked about how God took family, fortune and health from Job. They said that the one thing that remains, when you strip a man down completely naked, down bare past the flesh, down past the bedrock of what he thinks he is, they said there existed in Job a faith in God. And then the city was given as living proof of this single atom at the center of each person. If so many kept the faith in the face of such uncertainty, it must say something about the species.

The morbid pointed out that, during the Black Plague, when people died, they did it in or near churches. They were universally hated for saying these things.

Jewelry disappeared next. This invited more suspicion than any other disappearance. Many believed theirs had just been stolen, even after they'd been provided with evidence that nobody anywhere had any jewelry at all. Bracelets, rings, and necklaces were gone, as well as earrings; piercings of all kinds vanished along with the holes that once supported them. People with enormous silver dollar-sized gauges woke up to find the old sagging holes in their ears replaced by young, healthy-looking skin. It didn't matter if it was silver or gold, rope, leather, plastic, steel, or even an elastic band. It was all gone. Married couples tried to improvise wedding rings out of anything available: wood, keyrings, twisted bottle caps and wire were most common. As soon as they got used to the feel of the surrogate bands on their fingers, and forgot that there was ever a ring there in the first place, they looked down to see their hands bare again. The stubborn ones went through a few false rings before admitting defeat. The resourceful drew around where their wedding rings had once been with permanent marker. That worked for a while.

Then all evidence of time vanished. Everything related to the telling of time was gone one morning. Cell phones, watches, clocks that hung on walls and on the faces of buildings were gone; digital and analog clocks disappeared. The sundial at the university was gone. Calendars went, too. This didn't bother many as much as it should have. Most had abandoned their work, which made it a small hindrance; the sun traced its arc wide enough to make it accurate enough for the unemployed. Buses were rarely on time. The subway ran on a much wider schedule, for the sake of safety. Time didn't matter as much to people anymore. Existence became a series of guarded breaths, the length of which were not measured by days or hours now, but by the depth of sorrow between disappearances.

There was another pause in the vanishings from the middle of August to the start of the new school year. The Plexiglas was installed in time for it. For the first two weeks of the year, the teachers decided to do something without precedent. Due to the sense of urgency which prevailed throughout the vanishing city, the curriculum was narrowed down past worksheets and busywork into things the school district had agreed were most important. They read classics in the high school and asked questions that had bothered the Greeks. They made every student memorize as much poetry as could be memorized in two weeks. Before school began, the district asked some university professors for a list of the most beautiful pieces of music they'd ever heard. They had enough time to play some of these. They reveled in the beauty of the Pythagorean theorem, which they'd all agreed was easy enough to absorb on the fly.

The schools were right to rush, because in the second week of school, written words disappeared. The people of the city opened books, only to find masses of blank pages inside, with the impression of illegible typeface like ghosts of white on white on the face of every one. Pages of telephone books were emptied. The mayor first contemplated issuing an evacuation notice when this happened. How was a society supposed to function without words? Computers were now completely useless. How could anybody hold themselves accountable for anything if they had only their memory to fall back on- nothing to remind them of what had to be done, not even strings tied to their fingers?

The mayor took his voice memo recorder and spoke into it every last telephone number he could recall. He then called up the same electronics buyer he'd gotten the fans from and ordered a thousand similar voice memo machines. He called his engineers and told them to write down all the phone numbers they could remember- no words, just numbers, no words on the page, no words touching the page, just telephone numbers- and that they'd later be given tape recorders to document all these numbers. He gave the same advice to the city's stock market, which had been thrown into a complete panic; the ticker they all watched was just a succession of numbers with no indicator of which belonged to whom. They remained calm for as long as he spoke, then rushed off to find a paper and pen to do what he said before they forgot it.

Hospitals began to number their patients and their diseases. They kept track of them all, at first, by writing these numbers on the foreheads of everyone admitted. Then it was discovered that tattoos had disappeared as well. Anything written on skin would vanish as soon as it was left unwatched. So they wrote the numbers on the patients' hospital gowns, and that worked.

Schools became less like schools and more like celebrations of the beautiful things they could remember about humanity. The kids recited the poetry they'd memorized, and taught it to each other without any prodding from the teachers. They talked about those Greek problems, about how man could exist while isolated from what made him himself. The only real structure they maintained was the math. It was the only thing that would stay on the chalk boards. They drew triangles of all different sizes and then drew circles around them, and said how they all fit into an arc, no matter how you tried to distort it.

The mayor's idea of the tape recorders held things together for a few days. During this time, while the kids were at school, the adults were at church, trying to hear as much Scripture as there was to be remembered. More mention of Job was made, and more praise of the citizens for keeping their faith for so long. These crowds grew thinner and thinner as miserable, empty days passed. More people were moving out of the city. Leaving was a common thing, by now.

Those that had endured past the vanishing of the glass, the chairs, the heat, the bugs, the tears and time were there to hear the Mayor's final address to his constituency. They listened on the radio. He told them that had passed the local government's control. So many had left the city that it was now impossible for it to come back on its own. In the morning, he was going to issue an evacuation order. By the next sunset, all those listening would have to leave. The mayor had tried to ask the governor for some aid for the refugees, but he'd gotten no reply yet, and didn't expect to get one. He promised to return with help, promised this wasn't the end of the city. All that had vanished would come back again, and when that happened, the mayor would find a way to get them all back where they'd left off at the beginning of the vanishing. He hadn't written it in his speech, but he told them that a sadder city would be hard to find; they didn't even have rubble to rise out of. He told them how proud of them he was, recommended they gather their belongings, and bade them good night.

The next morning, they all woke up alone. They didn't know if they were truly alone, or just outside touch, smell, sight and sound of the others. It didn't matter. Everybody wondered if they had vanished, or if it was everybody else. Some walked the streets and wondered why and wound up in front of churches and tried to cry for the last of countless times. Some thought they saw squirrels racing around the trees, but they were shadows. Some broke into convenience stores and stocked up on food and water for the journey ahead. Some spent the morning clutching themselves and trying to squeeze out a tear for the wife, son, father, daughter, family that was taken from them, and looked for photographs, perfumes, clothes, locks of hair, blank pages where letters had been, proof that any of it had happened at all. There was none to be found.

The mayor was wrong about a few things in his farewell speech: he would not return, though he'd sometimes want to, and it was the end for the city. He was right about nightfall. Looking up at the streets strewn with wordless paper, at the windows like empty eyesockets of black netting, at the naked circles where clocks and fingernails had been, walking across deserted highways and feeling like an invisible man in a sea of invisible men, nobody would stay for the night.

They walked through the sunset and into the start of the night, with despair and horror and depravity licking every footfall. They walked without looking over their shoulders at the city they left behind, until the tall buildings molded into spiny lumps over the surface of the earth, until the highway curved and that little spine sunk down to a small dark patch in the blood red of the sunset, until the patch turned to a spot and the spot turned into a dot and the dot shrank into a point so small you had to squint to see it, if you could notice it at all. They walked until the sun fell into the place where the city had vanished. They walked until the streetlights came on and they could cry again.

Things began to disappear on the first day of summer.